Vending machines offer unattended sales of commodities such as snacks, canned or bottled beverages, or any of a variety of other articles. When placing a vending machine into service for the first time, a planogram (space-to-sales mapping) defining the which types of products available for vending are loaded within which “selections” or product positions. Similarly, when altering the products stocked in a vending machine or the distribution of products within the vending machine, the planogram must be updated.
The primary purpose of planogram programming, used primarily in glass front snack or cold drink vending machines, is to map products (referring to the type/brand of product) to selections (referring to the product column position in which a particular product is loaded and from which the product is vended). Multiple selections may contain the same product. Thus, for example, in a glass front snack vending machine, two selections may both contain Kit Kat candy bars. Selections within a planogram are typically identified two or three alphanumeric characters, the first identifying a “tray” or “shelf” (a horizontal row or subgroup of machine selections that includes all selections within that row) with selections on a row normally identified by the increasing (but not necessarily continuous) alphanumeric characters when going from left to right. Planograms may be necessary to establish proper pricing for different products within different selections.
Manually programming a complete vending machine planogram—or even a significant revision to an existing planogram—is both time consuming and error-prone. As a result, planogram programming is not typically done.
In addition to manual planogram programming, vending machine operators may “pre-configure” machines via enterprise-level software, with the resulting machine configuration data downloaded via a network or telemetry connectivity, or via a Data Exchange (DEX) handheld. However, such programming requires detailed, a priori knowledge of vending machine brand/type/model (e.g., CMS/Merchant/6) and tray/shelf configurations (number of trays, number of positions per tray, etc.).
There is, therefore, a need in the art for improved planogram programming in vending machines.